Canadians in running for world’s biggest literary prize
Two of Canada’s 2011 literary awards stars — Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt — have been longlisted for the world’s most lucrative literature prize, the 100,000-pound ($160,000) IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues won the Giller Prize last year, and deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers took the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2011.
There are 18 Canadians among the 154 contenders for the 2013 IMPAC prize.
The long list is compiled from submissions from libraries in 120 cities and 44 countries around the world.
Other Canadian titles include 2011 Giller nominee The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje; A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnson; A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe; Tell It to the Trees by Anita Rau Badami; Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul by David Adams Richards; The Reinvention of Love by Helen Humphreys; The Return by Dany Laferrière; and Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey, the latter two translated from French.
Among the other novels in the running are The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, winner of the 2011Man Booker Prize, which is also the hot favourite for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Pure by 1999 IMPAC winner Andrew Miller, who won the 2011 Costa Prize. For the full list of nominees, go to www.impacdublinaward.ie/nominees.